Listed Building record MDO9475 - Cranborne Lodge, Castle Street, Cranborne

A house built around 1700 with wings and staircases added soon after the middle of the eighteenth century. The building has walls of brick with stone dressings, and tiled roofs.

Cranborne Lodge; a striking and pwerful Early Georgian house. <2>

<1> Ordnance Survey, Ordnance Survey Map 6in, 1963 (Map). SWX1540.

(SU 05601314) Cranborne Lodge (NAT)

<2> Newman, J, and Pevsner, N, 1972, The Buildings of England: Dorset (Monograph). SWX1290.

<3> Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), 1975, An Inventory of Historical Monuments in the County of Dorset, Volume V (East), 12-13 (Monograph). SDO129.

‘(5) CRANBORNE LODGE (05601314), originally the house of the Stillingfleet family, is of three storeys with cellars and attics, and has brick walls with stone dressings, and tiled and leaded roofs. The square central block is of c. 1700. Soon after the middle of the 18th century, when the house belonged to the Drax's, E. and W. wings were added to the southern part of the block and E. and W. staircases to the northern part; on the first floor the W. wing contains a handsomely appointed drawing-room (advertisement, Salisbury Journal, 3 Feb. 1766). Extensions on the N.E. are of the late 18th or early 19th century.
The N. front of the original building is symmetrical and of four bays with a pediment; in the lower storey the two middle bays contain a central doorway with a columned and pedimented porch. The first-floor windows have rusticated architraves with heavy keystones; the second-floor windows are plain and the pediment has a round-headed central window. The E. and W. staircase bays have round-headed mezzanine windows.
The pedimented S. front of the original building (Plate 46) is of three bays. The lower storey, with a columned and pedimented central doorway, is rendered and forms a podium for a tetrastyle facade with Ionic pilasters which extend through the second and third storeys. The central window in the second storey is round-headed and has heavy rustication. The E. and W. wings are each of three bays; the storeys are higher than in the centre block and above the second-floor windows the roof is masked by a parapet.
Inside, the rooms have 18th-century fittings of good quality, with moulded cornices and skirting-boards, and panelling with fielded centres. The S. hall has a stone pavement and probably was the entrance hall in the original plan; it has a carved stone chimneypiece of c. 1700 (Plate 46). Ionic columns at the W. end of the hall replace the former outside wall. The first-floor drawing-room in the W. wing has a modelled and coloured plaster ceiling (Plates 38, 39) with rococo scroll-work and flower wreaths surrounding a gilt eagle with clouds and lightning; it closely resembles contemporary work at Came House (Dorset II, 386); the finely carved wooden chimneypiece has similar enrichment (Plate 46). The chamber over the N. hall has a highly enriched plaster entablature of c. 1700, retaining original gilding and colouring (Plate 38).’

<4> National Record of the Historic Environment, 213715 (Digital archive). SDO14739.

Record last edited

Aug 19 2022 1:31PM